During the last few weeks I received many update requests so I decided to update the old hypervisor comparison but this time I changed the setup a bit.

Changes:

No beta or pre-release versions are used. In the last document we also compared Hyper-V R2 beta which wasn’t officially released.
This time all software is available and no features are subject to change due to beta-test, etc.;

The versions used are the platinum/ultimate/fully-featured versions of the hypervisors. Product features can be limited by lower license versions;

No free versions have been used in this comparison.

I spend hours collecting information on Citrix XenServer 5.0 and 5.6, Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0 and R2 and VMware VI 3.5 and vSphere 4.1. Not all information is easy to find and some of it is even contradicting but I checked, double checked and Anne Jan did a full review so I’m pretty sure the information is 99,9999% accurate.

I hope you find the new Enterprise Hypervisor comparison useful and feel free to contact us when you have feedback for us to improve the list.

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Erik Scholten

The founder and driving force behind VMGuru. With over 20 years experience in IT, he now works as a Cloud Management Specialist at VMware Benelux. He worked as technical consultant, pre-sales and solutions architect for several systems integrators.
He's a long time VMware VCP Data Center Virtualization, VCP Desktop, VCP Cloud Management & Automation, VCA, VSP and VTSP, vExpert Cloud (2017) and one of the few 10 times vExpert (2009 - 2018).

Thanks for the input. Regarding the mentioned items:1. Intel VT is required to run x64 servers, so I added a comment.2. Hyper-V 1.0 does idd support thin provisioning but it's 3 times slower and only used for templates and not for production use. Because of that it is considered not available. I added a comment to clarify.3. Thin provisioning for XenServer 5 is only available on supported shared storage because it uses the storage to provide thin volumes. On local storage thin provisioning is always supported. I added a comment.4. Regarding the role based admin you are correct.

If we're going to add Red Hat virtualization? No, for now Red Hat is not very interesting for us as we never use or encounter it in enterprise infrastructures. It's a niche product which is not used very often. As soon as Red Hat becomes interesting for larger enterprises and it is used, we will certainly add it in our hypervisor comparison.

Which would you like to be updated? There’s no newer publically available version for any of the products as far as I know. Latest versions XenServer 6, vSphere 5 and Hyper-V 2.
An upgrade will be available as soon as vSphere 5.1 is released.

This this a RC (Release Candidate) so not a publically available, production ready version. When Microsoft releases Hyper-V 3 (which is the version in Windows Server 2012) we will add it to the comparison.